To Boldly Go Where Others Have Gone Before
by roisaber
Summary: Starfleet presents itself as a swashbuckling force for good in the popular media, but the truth is, behind all the glamor, it's mostly clerical work in space. Captain Harmony and the idiosyncratic crew of the USS Ennoia clean up the messes that blowhards like James T. Kirk leave behind.
1. Chapter 1

My name is Captain Harmony C. Stargate, and yes, I know it's a dumb name. My parents were ship-hitching hippies who stowed away in a hundred cargo bays before they had me, and they wanted me to follow in their footsteps. In some ways I did - here I am, deep in the scintellating darkness of space. And in other ways? Well, let's just say they got arrested for blocking the entrance to Starfleet Academy for its alleged species rights' abuses six times. So of course I went on to gain my own command. The USS Ennoia. Our motto is, come in hot and loud!

"Miss Stargate?" Oops. Lieutenant Rho had started treating me different ever since... well, you know. "I mean, Captain!"

"What is it?" I responded levelly.

"Standard orbit achieved. Launching probes on your command."

James T. Kirk, the secret hero of every underachieving slacker at the Academy, accepted his mission to boldly go where no one has gone before. The assignment given to the USS Ennoia was a just little bit different. If anything, we boldly went where _someone_ had gone before. After the discovery of a new star system, we were sent in to do secondary analysis after the big swinging dicks like the USS Enterprise had visited. It wasn't an entirely thankless job, but sometimes it came a little too close for comfort. As for the benefits package, well...

Rho swallowed. She must have caught me staring. Damn and double-damn! Look, you can't be so judgemental. There's 34 people in total on this ship, and I know every single one of them. Filter out the biological incompatibilities, personality conflicts, and general bad luck and I've slept with every single one of them. It's not easy to spend your time pulverizing asteroids to analyse their mass spectrometry and physical characteristics for nine months out of the year. The last time we got shot at, it was a _relief_. It meant something was happening.

"Sir?"

I waved my hand, a picture of statuesque grace. Or something.

"Go ahead, Miss Rho. Standard pattern."

_Ennoia_ shuddered beneath my feet as the probes were catapulted outward at high velocity. You'd think Starfleet engineers would have solved that seemingly trivial problem by now, but the last time _Ennoia_ was retrofitted was during the Turing administration. I realized I was smirking and drew my face carefully blank.

The probes darted away from the ship, bright little glows surrounded by the cold, distant beams of million-year-old starlight. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed that Lt. Rho was staring at me. I drew myself up a little taller, letting my small breasts rise then settle downward into the form-fitting lycra of my uniform. I could feel the life force of the ship flowing through my nerves. The pulse of _Ennoia_'s elderly engines gently vibrated the deck beneath my feet with a kind of energy that no science could quantify or qualify. The vents pumped used, ozone-scented air from the life support system into every nook and cranny of the ship's unfashionable bridge. I even fancied that I could see a painfully rapid flicker in the ship's lights perfectly in time with the refresh rate of the alternating current that kept my ship from every time it ran into a small patch of electrically charged space dust. Rho was still catching glances at me out of the corner of her eye. Damn it, when did everything get so complicated!?

Lt. Anderson cut into my reverie.

"Captain Stargate? The probes are in position and transmitting data now. Full bandwidth. Everything's Driskoli at this panel."

Dumb joke.

"Thank you, Mr. Anderson." I suppressed a sigh. "I'll be in my ready room for the rest of my duty cycle."

There was nothing more dull than doing the grunt work of backing up Starfleet Command's first impression of a new system with hard, carefully analyzed data. Sure, Jim Kirk and his gallivanting band of almost-pirates were able to do the glamorous work of discovering new places and new species. We humble crew of the USS _Ennoia_ followed them up; we took physical samples; analyzed genomes; and generally, did the actual research portion while the Command's Golden Children got all the credit. Without another word, I stalked into my ready room and tossed my carcass into my chair. I had 32 new messages from Starfleet in my inbox. All of them were undoubtedly tedious administrata that required a minimum input just taxing enough to keep me from slipping into unconsciousness. I was startled when I heard the tone of a request to enter.

"Welcome," I said, mechanically keying open the ready room door from my panel.

I was surprised - and not surprised - to see the face of Lt. Rho. I gestured to the seat in front of me.

"Captain..." Rho began.

I'm such an idiot. I don't belong in the captain's chair. All I do is make people uncomfortable, and as tedious as the mission may sometimes become, filling it with drama isn't an enviable character trait. I sighed. I spoke.

"I'm sorry. I was out of line," I said.

Lt. Rho looked back at me with tears sparkling in the corners of her eyes.

"Please don't say that. You made me feel... great. This is all my fault. It's just my childhood, and all my ..."

"I have a responsibility to the people of this ship. And the fact that I made you feel so uncomfortable is proof that I'm unfit for command." I offered her a datapad. "Just fill out this form, and I'll be recalled to Starfleet Command."  
>"That's not what I want."<p>

"That's what I deserve!"

We both stared at one another. We took breaths that were milliseconds apart, and our breasts rose and fell in almost - but not quite - perfect time.

"Harmony."

I tried to put aside my emotions and looked Elly in the eye.

"I can't be who you want me to be. I feel like I betrayed you the moment I first put my hands on your shoulders. I seduced you under false pretences. I'm not a responsible person; I'm not a family lady; I'm not a mother. I won't marry you and I won't share my whole life with you either. I won't be there when we're both old and playing Mahjong until we fall asleep with our heads in our chests and I don't love _love_ you. You were just a warm body there when I wanted one. I used you, and now I should face the consequences."

Lt. Rho snorted so hard she choked.

"Who the fuck are you, Harmony? You did good on the Academy's exams and now you think you're in charge of everything? I have desires too you know! How do you know that _I_ didn't just use _you_?"

My communicator chose that exact moment to ping me. I swear it always knows the very worse time to interrupt.

"Captain Stargate to the bridge! There's an unusual gravitational anomaly, Captain. It doesn't correspond to anything in our databases."

For a moment, my blue eyes locked with Elly's gray eyes. Our emotions would just have to wait.

"On my way."

[AUTHOR:] I have no idea what to make of this. I guess I just wanted to write _something_ for a little while. Maybe it goes nowhere; maybe it becomes a novella; maybe I turn it into an epic. I don't know. What do people want?


	2. Chapter 2

"On screen," Rho cut in before I could interject.

I glared, but she was too absorbed in the vidscreen to notice. The planet sedately rotated in front of us, with great blue-green seas pockmarked by large islands and archipelagos; its sky was earth-like with a faintly violet haze. Nothing struck me as being particularly noticeable.

"What am I looking at?" I finally asked.

"There appears to be evidence of intelligent life on the surface," Commander Anderson carefully explained. "We've seen evidence of cook fires; artificial structures; and even a freshwater dam."

I shrugged. "Is that so? Why didn't the USS Enterprise notice when it was in the star system? It reported this region as being devoid of sentient lifeforms."

The faint edges of a smile touched the Commander's lips.

"Ah, at the time, Captain, the USS Enterprise was apparently engaged with two Romulan Birds of Prey."

"So they were just too busy to notice?" I huffed. "Well, I guess that's why Starfleet Academy promotes slackers like us through the ranks."

Lt. Adebayo, our communications specialist, cut in.

"Advise standard protocol, Captain."

"Alright, get to it. Let's keep it short and simple, people. Lt. Adebayo, Rho, get down to sickbay and get yourselves made up like the natives." I clicked my communicator and paused to allow the voice recognition system to boot up. "Security Chief Enkhbayar. Meet up with Adebayo and Rho in the sickbay. You're going down to the planet."

Captain Kirk was a legend at the Academy; he was always first to beam down to a planet and the last to not blunder into danger. Of course, it was against all protocol. A captain's place was on the bridge of his or her ship, or else what's the point of being there at all? But I must admit, I had person reasons to avoid going on away teams as well. The USS _Ennoia_ was a perfectly climate-controlled environment, set to a slightly cool 22.5 degrees C over the mild objections of my tropics-addled crew.

Planets, of course, were different. In my experience, every planet in the galaxy was either too hot; too cold; too windy; not windy enough; too bright; too dim; too humid; too dry; and in possession of far too much gravity or far too little. The rancid-sweet smells of alien cooking filled every city. And the skies – oh the gods I don't officially believe in, the skies! They come in every nausea-inducing shade on the spectrum, ranging from puce to hangover orange to heavy flow brown to unsettlingly mauve. Even Earth proper was getting to be too much for me despite having been born there. Nowadays I preferred to take even my shore leave aboard ship, where I was in charge and could put things to my own liking.

So while the away team got fitted and prepped to go down to the surface, I sat in my command chair and fiddled. The probes returned exciting data from the planet below, like exact atmospheric composition right down to the dodecamicron. .04 part per million xenon! Be still my beating heart. Finally, Lt. Rho and her team were ready to go down to the surface. With a wave of my hand, I consigned them to the surface of the world below, XJC211.1B V.

Even the name was boring.

I'd caused for there to be a timer superimposed onto the main forward viewscreen, and it slowly eked out the seconds as the ship hung over the skies of the world, moving too fast for gravity to seize. We were in a slightly asynchronous orbit, and if you watched very closely, you could almost see the _Ennoia_ crawling forward above the landmasses and strange seas of the unnamed – merely designated – world. I keyed up an image of the suspected intelligence onto my command station. The creatures were humanoid, but hairy, lanky, and possessed of a strange hunch that kept them from standing fully upright. Oh, I'd still fuck one, of course. One of the benefits of being a slacker was never worrying too much about who your partner, is, so long as you're having fun. That was one of the problems with Rho in fact. She was a Serious Lesbian, with a Serious plan for her Serious life. She'll get married at 32, take maternity leave at age 35, have 2.4 children and retire in Monterey at age 40 just close enough to Starfleet Command to give occasional lectures to Academy freshmen. Ugh, I should have gotten to know her better before getting intimate with her.

Lt. Rho uploaded a datastream to the ship. It was full of holograms, video, and still images of the creatures from the planet. The humanoids wore clothes, after a fashion, but their outfits and ornamentations seemed designed to enhance rather than conceal their standard-looking genitals. In a way I felt strangely jealous. We're _so_ advanced that instead of being totally honest about our desires and motivations we have to keep them carefully hidden behind social constructs and obnoxious games. Maybe I just need to go on a regular date. I noted, and not without interest, that one of the creatures – is it really fair to call them that? - had a notably impressive ball sack. I marked the image and scrolled on. Shlick material for later.

Suddenly, Lt. Enkhbayar's alarmed voice cut into my reverie.

"Captain, we -!"

And that was it. The transmission cut off.

"Aziah, get him back on the line," I snapped.

The acting Comm officer looked up at me. "I can't, Captain. He's turned off his communicator."

"Idiot! Why would he do that?" I took a deep breath, and then another one. "It wasn't destroyed? He actually turned it off?"

"Yessir."

"Well, there must be a reason behind it. Lt. Enkhbayar is no fool. Shit. Okay, keep tabs on all of them. Can we get a probe in place to monitor their movements?"

"I'm doing it now," our Bajoran Science Chief, Thayar announced. "It'll take an hour to get it repositioned."

So we waited. I occasionally asked a question, just to appear relevant. There were no further attempts to contact us from the away team, and I decided against trying to open a channel myself. If Lt. Enkhbayar turned off his communicator on purpose, he must have had a good reason for doing so. We slowly crossed the terminator line and orbited into the planet's enormous shadow. I was briefly awestruck to see the world below start to glow with light – apparently, the seas were filled with bioluminescent creatures so pervasive as to give the night side of XJC211.1B V an ethereal glow.

I was preparing another away team when Lt. Enkhbayar suddenly hailed the ship.

"Go ahead, Enkhbayar. Is everyone alright?" I asked as soon as his communicator flared to life.

"In a manner of speaking, Captain. No one is injured. We've been captured by a local tribe of sentient humanoids. I'm not sure how, but they saw through the stealth shielding we were using to prevent the locals from noticing us. The universal translators are having trouble with their language, since it evolved independently of any known species or dialect, but the gist seems to be that they mistook us for members of a competing tribe and we're going to be sold as slaves on the next market day."

For a brief moment, I entertained the idea of reporting them MIA and just leaving them there. And the idea was entertaining. Enkhbayar would handle life as a slave on a primitive world the same way he handled everything – calm, disinterested acceptance. Adebayo would give them nothing but trouble, and Rho! Lt. Rho would be a real piece of work. Knowing her, she'd start enumerating the rights of sentience starting back at Hammurabi's Code, work her way through the Soviet Constitution to Constitution of the United Federation of Planets, and then she'd start over again from the beginning. She'd ultimately lead some kind of revolution against the planet's acting power structures until she'd reshaped it into her idea of a perfect society – the thought was enough to make anybody shudder.

I entertained the idea for another moment.

Look, I wasn't planning on actually _doing_ it. Sheesh, it is kind of funny, right?

"Why didn't the cloaking work?" I asked aloud. "Any insights?"

Enkhbayar answered, "I think these creatures may have unique sensory organs that allow them to see a much wider ranger of the electromagnetic spectrum than human beings. Scans with the tricorder indicate that not only do they have large brains, but they seem to have distributed processing organs throughout their central nervous system. In short, it's likely that they perceive the world around them ten to a hundred times more acutely than human beings. Even the smallest distortion in the cloaking field would show up to them as obvious as a flashing neon sign."

The galaxy is full of wonders, isn't it? It just figures that most of those wonders only want to metabolize us.

"Where are you now?"

"In a fortified adobe building, under guard. We could probably break out but we'd be risking native casualties in the process. They're armed with atlatl that might seem primitive but don't be fooled – they could bring down a buffalo at 100 meters with one of those."

"Are you being watched? Can we just beam you up?"

"Maybe, but wouldn't that violate the prime directive?" Enkhbayar asked. "After all, the locals will get to wondering how their prisoners just vanished under their nose. No need to create legends of new gods."

Right, there's that Official Starfleet Atheism again. Of course there's no _explicit_ rule against religious faith among the ranks, and in non-humans the continuation of religiously inspired rituals is downright encouraged. But you're not supposed to really believe that stuff; it's supposed to be a wonderful colors-of-the-rainbow expression of multiculturalism. I wouldn't be officially censured if it were to be known that I worship Mazu, goddess of seafarers, and Quan Yin, the goddess of mercy - but people certainly would look at me askance and it would likely be the end of my career advancement. Well, not that _that_ was going anywhere anyway. Maybe it was all just a dumb hold-over from my hippie parents anyway.

Wait, this is _not_ the time for that stuff.

I pondered aloud. "So you can't run, because even in the dimmest torchlight they'd be able to see you flee."

"They wouldn't even need the torchlight. They can see the infrared of our body heat," Enkhbayar noted sardonically.

"And if we just beam you out it'll be paralyzingly obvious that a hitherto fore unconceived Power was at work. Well, that's a pretty dilemma."

"I have an idea, Captain," Anderson suggested. "Let's use the ship's deflector dish to create a storm over the town where they're being held. Enough wind and fury and everyone will be forced to take shelter in their own homes; nobody is going to be too worried about low-value prisoners in all that chaos."

"Enkhbayar, would that work?"

"You'd have to be careful, Captain," Rho answered instead. "A lot of their dwellings are pretty ramshackle. This adobe keep is the largest and best-reinforced structure we've seen in town."

"Can it be done? Lots of sound and noise but no real damage?" I asked Anderson.

"I'll get on it at once."

In theory, it all ought to be as easy as typing "change weather" into the ship's main computer. In practice, there were tedious hours of calculating atmospheric composition; evaluating microclimate phenomenea that could be electromagnetically coaxed into growing into something bigger; and examining local topography for the best way to bring the artificially managed storm front over the target location. The hum of the ship's engines on standby went down an octave in pitch as the deflector dish was recalibrated to transfer energy at specific frequencies and into specific locations in the planet's atmosphere. Sure enough, however, I could hear the growing howl of wind and the occasional crash of lightning from the away team's open channel.

I gestured at Anderson. "Get a transporter lock on the team. At the next close lightning strike, beam them all up at once. Hopefully the light and the noise will overload their acute senses for long enough to provide a plausible cover story for the away team's escape. I'm going to the transporter room."

This is why I don't like leaving the ship.

The elevator whooshed open and at a word of command bore me down the three decks to the transporter room. _Ennoia_ was a small craft as capital ships in Starfleet go; she's only six decks tall and 190 meters long. When I stepped into the transporter room Ensign Draco was fiddling with the controls, trying to get a lock on the three members of the away team through the pressing storm.

"Hurry it up," I hissed, trying and failing to hold my tongue. "We've got to time this as precisely as possible."

Draco replied, as French as a baguette, "Eh, Captain. There is much interference from the storm. It should only be a few more moments."

I tapped my foot impatiently. After an interminable wait, the characteristic bedazzled glow of three forms materialized in the transporter room of the ship. The first thing I did was start laughing.

"Are you serious?" I gasped through my giggles. "You all look like you're cosplaying as Wookiees."

"Fuck off, Captain," Rho mumbled without genuine rancor.

I finally got myself under control.

"Well, care to offer any explanations?" I demanded. "Lt. Enkhbayar, you were in charge of managing the security of the away team. What went wrong?"

"It was totally unexpected, Harmony. We had no way of knowing that the natives had such powerful organic senses. Frankly, from what I saw, they could put a tricorder to shame with nothing but their meat. I shudder to think of what kind of evolutionary pressures drove them to such a sophisticated set of sense apparatus."

"Very well. You're all dismissed to write your reports. I'm sure Starfleet will be interested to learn of this new species – there's little doubt that a team of xenobiologists could learn a lot from these people." I snorted. "_If_ they can find a way of cloaking their facility."

Rho paused in the doorway. "Oh, about that, Captain. The locals have been talking about all the signs and wonders in their skies of late. First there was the war between three gods from six years ago, and now the appearance of a strange new god in the sky. They can see our ships."

Of course. That made sense, after all – all "primitive" peoples are avid skywatchers, and with their unique sensory acuity, our ships would stick out like sore thumbs in a sky they knew by heart.

"Oh, for fuck's sake!" I sputtered. "I guess there's no help for it now; include it in your report."

"Aye."

There was another long and pregnant pause, and I noticed that Lt. Rho still hadn't taken her leave. She had cropped blonde hair, grey eyes, and she was taller than me by a full third of a meter. She _was_ cute; beautiful even. It was no great wonder how I'd fallen into the trap of her charms. She was always wearing her heart on her sleeve everywhere she went. I liked her – but I'd never love her the way she wanted to be loved. I didn't have, and didn't want, the capacity for that.

"Yes, Elly?" I asked quietly while the rest of the crew exited out of earshot.

Elly Rho laughed and then shrugged.  
>"I just wanted to know if you wanted to get a drink in the lounge, later, after I'm done writing my report. We could talk."<p>

I sighed. It's not like there was any getting around it.

"Aye, we could talk."


End file.
